Audience-Alienating Premise cleanup

Sounds cutworthy to me. A lot of those elements, like Parental Bonus, are not necessarily alienating as many other Nick shows utilized them.

Bringing up the following example from Blood And Chocolate:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The film is ostensibly based upon the young adult werewolf novel by Annette Curtis Klause, but makes so many changes to the plot and characters it's barely recognizable. In the process it became a bland and generic supernatural love story that's been told a hundred times, stripping out the more unique and gritty elements from the novel. The end result is that fans of the book weren't interested because it had little in common with the story they loved, while other people weren't interested because it looked cheesy and cliched; it couldn't even appeal to horror fans because it clearly played up romantic drama over the horror elements. The film only grossed $6 million on a budget of $15 million.

Sounds more like Uncertain Audience to me.

I think They Changed It, Now It Sucks! would work or better instead ?

Edited by miraculous on Apr 4th 2021 at 6:46:36 AM

I found this on the YMMV page for The Exception:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: A hot and sexy Romeo and Juliet-style romance between a Jewish Resistance Fighter and a Nazi.

That's just a Zero-Context Example that can be commented out for now.

The page has no other examples, so it should just be cut overall.

Edited by jandn2014 on Apr 8th 2021 at 7:12:49 AM

What happens if the author deliberately creates a work with an alienating premise, but that doesn't necessarily make it unpopular? The work in question is Hatoful Boyfriend.

Invoked Trope (albeit mentioning it didn't work per say)

There's Springtime for Hitler.

They didn't intend for the work to fail. They made a difficult-to-accept premise because they wanted to see if people would get into the deeper story regardless. The quote on the YMMV page is, "I wanted to create something that seems ridiculous and crazy at first glance, but that once you look into the world, you would fall into the depth."

AAP doesn't allow examples for specific seasons of a TV series, right? Because YMMV.Supergirl 2015 has this:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Season 5 is currently getting a lot of undeserved fan criticism. However, two of the main season long plots have received a negative reaction from fans and critics and been identified as a reason for declining ratings:
  • Lena's descent into evil has upset fans of Lena who had hoped the show would not take this approach and make her a villain instead of letting her be a positive role model. Seeing a fan favorite suddenly deliberately betraying and hurting her friends (while at the same time trying to forcibly remove the ability for others to do the same) has been hard to watch. Likewise, fans who wanted Lena to go evil, as well as fans who dislike Lena, are annoyed that the show still does not want to make Lena a true villain, opting instead to make her more of a sympathetic Anti-Villain and a Well-Intentioned Extremist, and are upset that the show might redeem her out of nowhere.
  • The Kara and William romance is proving to be unpopular with both fans and critics. As of March 2020, not one regular Supergirl media reviewer approves of the relationship. The lack of chemistry between the two actors, the rushed and sudden attraction between the two, and shoehorning William as part of the "Superfriends" is turning viewers (not just upset Karamel and Supercorp shippers) off and even inspired a boycott of one episode. To date the two episodes where previews made clear they would feature the William and Kara romance have been the two lowest watched in the show's history.
  • For many fans, it appears that the show is deliberately trolling them, as both fans and critics pleaded after a highly praised season 4 not to turn Lena evil or give Kara a love interest (noting that in S4, Kara was much better written without any romantic baggage). The showrunners seem to have ignored both requests.

Most of that can go under Seasonal Rot or Broken Base. I'd get rid of the part accusing the authors of deliberately trolling the audience. Unless there's proof of that, it's an uncalled for accusation.

Should I remove this example from Chick Tracts? Chick Tracts are massively successful, and thus don’t really qualify in my opinion.

I don't know if Chick Tracts are massively successful. My understanding is his following is pretty cult, made up mostly of people who make fun of the comics.

Yeah, I've never heard of anyone genuinely, unironically liking them.

Yes but from what I’ve heard the tracts have sales in the range of millions of dollars (if Jontron’s video on Darkest Dungeons is any indication).

Right, from ironic fans. People buy them to mock them, or at least I think. I could be wrong, but sales numbers aren't enough.

I admit, I am a little concerned that "ironic fans" could become an argument that allows folks to dismiss genuine audiences. Opinion Myopia is a common thing and I worry that we are disregarding actual fans if we assume (without concrete evidence) that an audience is not legitimate.

Edit: Ignore, I was confused at what we were talking about and my post was stupid.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 15th 2021 at 2:38:46 PM

Chick Tracts are/were well received by their intended audience, so I'll say they don't belong in AAP as no one who would buy them unironically is being "alienated." It's basically equivalent to calling Teletubbies AAP because no one without kids is buying it.

Bringing up the following example from John Carter:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Some people who didn't want to watch the movie said they couldn't buy into the premise of a former Confederate soldier who goes to Mars and dresses like Conan. Furthermore, the source material has been copied so much that the official adaptation succumbed to Seinfeld Is Unfunny.

I'd say it passes. A Confederate Soldier as the Protagonist was inevitably going to limit its appeal, and the movie performed dismally enough to can what was planned to be a trilogy.
Done.

Edited by DDRMASTERM on Apr 19th 2021 at 12:15:13 PM

It should mention the bad performance in the example though, for full context.

Bringing up the following example from Miami Vice:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Actually, the basic premise is fairly standard...it's the execution that threw a lot of people off. Part of the mixed reception that the film received among audiences (initially at least) was because of its emphasis on atmosphere and texture instead of plot, dialogue, or character development. The fact that Michael Mann seemed to try as hard as he could to distance the movie from the original series probably didn't help.